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Women execs 'moving the needle' locally

No women in the C suite? Not the case with this year's CFO of the Year awards.

Studies showing that roughly 8 percent of the CFOs in the United States are women might come as a shock to someone reading through the list of this year's Crain's CFO of the Year awards.

Of the nine winners and finalists, four are women.

It prompted me to take a look at the list of nominees for the awards, and more than a third of this year's nominees are also women.

While I'd like to give a definite number on the percentage of woman CFOs in the Detroit area's companies, nobody has performed such a study yet.

There are, however, some national statistics we can look at, in particular, a 2012 study by New York City-based GMI Ratings. GMI, a corporate governance consulting firm, took a look at 1,910 companies and did a careful analysis of how many are women. In the end, they found that just 155 have woman CFOs, representing 8 percent.

Gender diversity in the management of a company means better performance as well. At least that's the point of a Credit Suisse report released last year examining the performance of 2,360 companies. The study found that investing in a firm with women on the management board provides a better yield than companies lacking gender diversity.

The nominees and winners in this awards program for Crain's represent a snapshot of the folks who have some achievements under their belt and are ready to take some credit.

As president and CEO of Detroit-based Inforum, Terry Barclay and her organization are focused on boosting women's careers. With no local numbers she can find, anecdotally she's seen the number of local woman executives expand.

She pointed to several studies which show that the skills of a top executive need to be a combination of hard skills -- the basic mastery of numbers -- and, most importantly, be combined with the soft skills, such as communicating, dealing with people and being perceptive.

"We have 2,000 members, and we see them going after the soft skills, and that's the component that needs to be built," Barclay said. "I do see the local woman executives moving the needle."

Women can often help each other; Barclay said she encouraged Inforum members to nominate themselves or colleagues for the Crain's CFO awards.

"We encouraged our members to put themselves out there," she said. "We all need the visibility."